The Post-Partisan President

You know why Obama is difficult to listen to? Because of all the whoppers he tells. One of the more tenacious fictions he repeats is that he attempted to work with Republicans when he came to the White House, but that they had decided they weren’t going to work with him. Republicans became the party of “No.” It’s become his mid-term mantra on the campaign trail and interviews:

I still remember going over to the Republican caucus to meet with them and present our ideas, and to solicit ideas from them before we presented the final package. And on the way over, the caucus essentially released a statement that said, “We’re going to all vote ‘No’ as a caucus.” And this was before we’d even had the conversation. At that point, we realized that we weren’t going to get the kind of cooperation we’d anticipated. The strategy the Republicans were going to pursue was one of sitting on the sidelines, trying to gum up the works, based on the assumption that given the scope and size of the recovery, the economy probably wouldn’t be very good, even in 2010, and that they were better off being able to assign the blame to us than work with us to try to solve the problem.

Nice that they now tries to blame the current economy on the minority party.

The comment about bipartisanship is a joke. As a candidate Mr. Obama spoke about it, but as a president whose party enjoyed massive majorities in both houses of Congress, he ignored it. He could have severely weakened his opposition by drawing them in. Instead, Mr. Obama strengthened Republicans by taunting them with their seeming irrelevance, and he fashioned legislation that only Democrats could vote for. Now many of them will lose their jobs because of their votes.